Solidarity Statement from Vancouver Rape Relief & Women's Shelter

Re-posted from Vancouver Rape Relief & Women's Shelter

June 25, 2013

On June 22, 2013 Vancouver Rape Relief & Women’s Shelter hosted an all day event with local feminist allies to discuss, evaluate and strategize different tactics of women’s resistance to male violence against women.

Dozens of women participated in the day including members of the Indigenous Women Against the Sex Industry (IWASI), the Committee for Domestic Workers and Caregivers Rights, the Asian Women’s Coalition Ending Prostitution (AWCEP), EVE (formerly Exploited Voices now Educating) and past and current collective members of Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter.

During the day we passed a resolution to publicly express our solidarity with Deep Green Resistance in light of the recent attack on their members at the Law and Disorder Conference and afterward:

We condemn the attack on the members of Deep Green Resistance at Law and Disorder Conference in Portland Oregon. We are appalled by the conference organizers utter refusal to protect DGR members from threats, bullying and silencing and troubled that no other participant interfered or insisted that the conference will practice its premise for “safe space”.

We stand in solidarity with Deep Green Resistance and its commitment to feminist principles including the right of women (as all oppressed groups) to define their boundaries and decide who is allowed in their space.

Hilla Kerner, for the Collective of Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter

Protect Women, Feminism, and Free Speech

Call for Support! Protect Women, Feminism, and Free Speech
The past few days have seen a massive smear campaign against radical feminists such as Rachel and Lexy Garza of Deep Green Resistance. This smear campaign was launched in the aftermath of an attack on Deep Green Resistance members (one of whom was Lexy).

When feminists, supportive women and other allies responded with fury and uproar about this attack, it triggered a backlash from those who accuse DGR and other radical feminists of being transphobic. We are not transphobic, and will be further responding to these allegations.

These accusations made against us were followed by violent threats (including threats of death and sexual assault). DGR members who made similar comments would be immediately removed from the organization. This behavior is unacceptable. Now, these people have begun to contact venues for a speaking tour that Rachel is planning for next month. They have used lies and threats to coerce these venues to cancel several engagements.

Stand UP FOR WOMEN and AGAINST BULLYING AND HARASSMENT!
Let’s band together and support DGR and Rachel and help her keep her speaking engagements. A form letter is available at the link below for those who want to prevent these events from being cancelled. We urge you to consider standing against censorship. Women with controversial and salient platforms most certainly have an eager audience awaiting them, despite contrary opinion.
Support Rachel

WE NEED SUPPORT AND SECURITY!
If you would like to host the Resistance Rewritten Tour in your location please contact deepgreenresistance@riseup.net. We are calling out to feminists and allies to fight back against bullying. Don't let the bullies stop these important words from being heard.
We will be heavily increasing security at upcoming events in order to keep Rachel and other speakers safe. This costs money, so if you can help us out with security please donate at the link below, and share this message widely!
http://www.gofundme.com/resistancerewritten

STAND UP!
This is another example of the continued threats of harassment and calls to silence those who have spoken out and organized in support of radical feminism. Deep Green Resistance will not tolerate threats of violence or attempts to intimidate or silence women. The actual and immediate threat against females as a class is continued brutalization and repression by males as a class. The real reason for this oppression is the inherently toxic violation imperative that we call ‘masculinity,” and it is on these issues that our focus will remain, despite ongoing attempts to foment horizontal hostility. Ultimately, we defend women only spaces: some of the only spaces left for women to effectively organize and resist their own oppression. We stand in solidarity with all groups and individuals who fight to end the oppression of women under patriarchy.

Criticism of the politics raised by the transgender movement is very different than a wholesale hatred of people who choose to transition. This nuance is very often missed by the very same people spamming venues with blanket declarations of transphobia.

Resistance Rewritten Tour Description
It's often repeated that "history is written by the victors." The colonist and the slave owner, the warmonger and the CEO alike use their stolen power to control which stories are remembered, taught, and celebrated - and which are distorted, suppressed, and in some cases, forgotten altogether.

Spanish philosopher George Santayana put it rather more bluntly when he wrote that "history is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there." But it is not enough to dismiss mainstream historical narratives as irrelevant. We must ask- what has been omitted, and why? When we look past the rosy fiction to the buried truth, we begin to uncover a true history of resistance that is still unfolding.

In the era of catastrophic biodiversity loss, toxification, and climate change, the world is facing challenges of unprecedented magnitude, and we are running out of time. The stakes could not be higher. Will we fall prey to the lies of the powerful and miss our chance at victory, or can we write a brighter future by learning from resistance movements of the past?

Response to Aric McBay's "Deep Green Resistance and Transphobia"

Deep Green Resistance has refrained from making any statement in regards to the circumstances under which Aric McBay left the organization to date. This decision was made on the basis that it would be unhelpful to resistance efforts in general and also because DGR did not wish to speak badly of him.

Because he has now chosen to publicly make statements that do not reflect the actual events of his departure, DGR is issuing the following statement.

Aric McBay was part of a small, unsuccessful effort to oust both Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen from the organization. The entire staff and many of the members resisted this attempt.

DGR's stance on women's spaces was only one issue on the table among others at this time. It was the women of DGR who made the decision to keep women's spaces for women only. It was not decided by Derrick Jensen or Lierre Keith. The assertion that this was policy handed down from them is a lie.

Aric was part of a conference call about this subject and chose to say nothing. He left the organization soon after, taking a large sum of DGR money for work he had not done and which he has yet to pay back. His only comment was that there was a lack of transparency in decision making. Until that point the majority of decisions had been made by himself and a co-coordinator.

It is clear that Aric's departure was for the best. Feminist politics, including the right of women to define their own spaces, is central to our work.  Anyone who does not respect the choices of women does not belong in DGR.

Incidents This Weekend

Three incidents occurred at the "Law and Disorder Conference" in Portland May 11 and 12 concerning Deep Green Resistance and transgender/queer activists. A lot of lies have been told about these incidents. We need to tell the facts of what physically happened.

Two women were tabling, handing out DGR literature and selling books. A group of five transgender/queer activists came up to the table. One of the male queer activists began shouting at the women, using aggressive language. This man made threatening gestures toward the women. He grabbed and defaced table materials. When one of the women went to protect the materials, he marked her arm and hand as well.

This conference states it has a policy of safe spaces, but "safe spaces" evidently doesn't apply to women, because although most people in the room had no choice but to hear the shouting, no one, including the organizers, intervened to stop this man and his aggressive behavior.

A half an hour later, a male DGR member tried to engage in respectful conversation with these queer activists. They began chanting at him and insulting him, culminating in them throwing trash and food at his head.

The next day, Sunday, the DGR crew went back, for more tabling, and an angry mob of queer activists again approached the table, yelling and cursing at them, and demanded that they leave. Once again, for all their talk of "safe spaces," the organizers did not intervene, nor provide a safe space.

You will see that throughout all of this, the DGR members were respectful and courteous. They tried to de-escalate. Nonetheless, they were the recipients of bullying, threats, and silencing.

One of the organizers, Brandon Speck, witnessed much of this, and at least pretended to express concern for the women. He originally said that the perpetrators would not be invited back next year. He also promised that he would write up a statement of solidarity with the victims condemning the attacks. He further promised to run this statement by the victims before publishing it. He was not telling the truth. He did not run the statement by the women, and the statement he did publish indeed blames the DGR members for their own victimization. Women from all over responded en masse to this by pointing out that this was the classic victim-blaming that characterizes patriarchy and misogyny. The thread was deleted, and the organizer falsely claimed this was because of "violently transphobic comments." This was as much a lie as their original release blaming the victims. The only violence in the comments was directed at DGR members.

DGR has never threatened anyone, and has a Code of Conduct that disallows making threats against people. Any DGR person who behaved as violently as any of the queer activists did at this conference would be immediately banned from DGR. Instead, what has happened is a barrage of threats against DGR members, up to and including mass beheading. And yet these comments are allowed to remain.

We ask everyone to stand in solidarity with all victims of patriarchal, male-pattern violence, starting with the women who were subjected to this at the Law and Disorder conference.

REAL: Resistance Education At Libraries

Deep Green Resistance is pleased to announce the launch of REAL: Resistance Education At Libraries. This easy to use website helps identify libraries lacking our targeted resistance media, and makes it easier to contact each library or "Suggest a purchase" to fill in the gaps.

REAL initially focuses on three foundational works of the Deep Green Resistance and strategic anti-civ movement:

• Deep Green Resistance by Derrick Jensen, Aric McBay, and Lierre Keith is crucial reading for anyone who has accepted that civilization is destroying the planet, but hasn't known how to respond. This is the single most useful book to grow our movement of strategically thinking resisters. Deep Green Resistance is a plan of action for anyone determined to fight for this planet -- and win.
• Endgame, by Derrick Jensen, gives readers a crash course in anti-civ critique, an excellent and (relatively) succinct summary of what's wrong with this culture and why. Many people already know this in their bones, but will benefit from Jensen's eloquence and analysis to help them piece together a coherent big picture. By challenging readers to seriously ask themselves what it will take to make them fight back, and what that might look like for them as individuals and as a movement, this volume builds an important foundation for Deep Green Resistance. This book has awakened and radicalized many people, and has the potential to reach many more.
• The Myth of Human Supremacy, also by Derrick Jensen' debunks the near-universal belief in a hierarchy of nature and the superiority of humans. Vast and underappreciated complexities of nonhuman life are explored in detail--from the cultures of pigs and prairie dogs, to the creative use of tools by elephants and fish, to the acumen of caterpillars and fungi. The paralysis of the scientific establishment on moral and ethical issues is confronted and a radical new framework for assessing the intelligence and sentience of nonhuman life is put forth.

Many people first came to their awareness of the problems of civilization and the need to fight back thanks to these works. Getting them into public libraries will make them more accessible to people who find them by accident, or who seek them out after hearing about Deep Green Resistance and anti-civ activism.

You can help by using the website tools to make suggestions to your local library and to encourage friends and family to do the same. You can also contribute funds to help us donate copies of these media to libraries which can't afford them from their own acquisition budgets.

To learn more about the project, or to get started, please visit Resistance Education At Libraries

Thoughts on "Pandora's Seed"

The following is from Bud Nye, A Deep Green Resistance supporter in Washington State:

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After reading Pandora's Seed, Why the Hunter-Gatherer Holds the Key to Our Survival (2007), by Spencer Wells, here are some of my thoughts:

Early in the book I sensed a technotopian slant. Sure enough, as I read more it became clear that, like so many technological utopian people today, Wells seems seriously to believe that we can steal energy from Earth's ecosystems at the scale of our fossil fuel use without massively damaging those living systems with their billions of living beings.

Recruitment: An excerpt from Deep Green Resistance

Chapter 10
Recruitment
by Aric McBay
When they asked for those to raise their hands who’d go down to the courthouse the next day, I raised mine. Had it high up as I could get it. I guess if I’d had any sense I’d’ve been a little scared, but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do to me was kill me and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.
—Fannie Lou Hamer, civil rights leader

Methods of outreach and recruitment vary depending on whether a group is aboveground or underground, how it is organized, and what role is being filled. There are really two kinds of recruitment, which you might call organizational and mutual recruitment. In organizational recruitment, an existing organization finds and inducts new members. In mutual recruitment, unorganized dissidents find each other, and forge a new resistance group. When resistance is well established, organizational recruitment can flourish. When resistance is rare or surveillance extensive, dissidents mostly have to find each other.

Recall that a movement can be divided into five parts based on roles: leaders, the cadres or professional revolutionaries who form the movement’s backbone, combatants or other frontline activists, auxiliaries, and the mass base.

Leaders, if they are recruited at all, are likely to find each other early on or be recruited from within the organization (especially in the underground, for the obvious reasons that they are known, have experience, and can be trusted).

The cadres and combatants or frontline activists are recruited in person, screened, and given training. Recruiting such people may require the bulk of recruitment resources, but that commitment of resources is necessary; cadres form the backbone of the resistance as professionals who give their all to the organization, and combatants are, of course, on the front lines.

Auxiliaries may be easier to recruit because they require a lesser commitment to the group, and the screening process may be simpler because they do not need to be privy to the same information and organizational details as those inside the organization. However, there generally should be some kind of personal contact, at least to initiate the relationship.

The mass base does not require direct recruitment because they support the resistance because of their own circumstances or experience, combined with propaganda and outreach from the resistance. Outreach to the mass base can take place through inexpensive mass media like books and newspapers, so that they require minimal effort per person to “recruit,” but they also offer little or no material support to the resistance. However, they may take some action on prompting from the resistance, and participate generally in acts of omission or noncooperation with those in power.

So how does one recruit? It depends. Aboveground groups have it pretty easy in terms of recruitment, because recruitment plays to their strengths. It’s relatively easy for them to engage in outreach and to publicize their politics and actions. Of course, because of this they are more vulnerable to infiltration. Underground groups need a somewhat more involved recruitment procedure, largely for security reasons, and they have a much smaller pool of potential recruits. All of this brings us to one of the most important conundrums for modern-day militants, what you might call the paradox of militant radicalization.

Most people who want to change the world start with low-risk, accessible activities, things like signing petitions or writing letters. When those don’t work, activists may escalate to protests, disruption, and civil disobedience. Maybe they are teargassed or beaten at a protest, and they become radicalized. If they care enough about their cause, they will continue to ratchet up their action until it works. Unless their issue is popular enough to be solved with legal action, activists eventually hit a wall at which further escalation is illegal or dangerous. At this point, some people choose to act underground. And here’s the paradox: aboveground action is based on getting attention. The people who have been the most persistent and relentless and most successful at raising awareness—the very people with the dedication and drive needed to go underground—may be the people who are at the most risk in going underground.

People living in overtly oppressed groups do not have the privilege of ignorance, and are more likely to be radicalized younger and in greater numbers. But within a surveillance society that doesn’t alter our fundamental problem: the process of militant radicalization is liable to draw counterproductive attention to the radical, simply because most people don’t turn to militant action until they have personally exhausted the less drastic and lower-risk avenues. Many of the most serious and experienced members of aboveground resistance thus become cut off from further escalation.

There’s no perfect solution; serious resistance entails risk, and all members have to decide for themselves what levels of risk they are willing to take on. Keeping a low profile is part of the answer. Someone who is considering serious underground resistance should avoid prominent, militant aboveground action; it’s important not to draw unwanted attention in advance. That doesn’t mean that people should stop being activists or stop being political, but militant aboveground action is a definite disqualifier for underground action.

This paradox must be addressed by individual communities of resistance having a culture of resistance. We must offer alternatives to the traditional routes of radicalization. Rather than simply following the default path, budding activists need to be told that there is a choice to be made between aboveground and underground action. Activists can privately discuss these options with trusted friends, but without planning specific actions (which would entail extra risk). This applies regardless of whether a movement is willing to use violence or not. As we have discussed, repression happens when a movement is effective, regardless of their tactics: witness Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Furthermore, it’s our assumption that successful resistance will grow, gather attention, and progress toward more militant activity as needed. That growth will increasingly draw unwanted attention and infiltration from intelligence agencies. That means any resistance movement that plans to eventually succeed needs to incorporate excellent security measures from the very beginning. Because the situation has been worsened by the rapid development of electronic surveillance, we radicals have been a bit behind the curve on this. Recruitment is a crucial area to apply good security.

__________________________________________

Read the entire chapter by purchasing Deep Green Resistance or borrowing it from your local library.

The moral and organizational strength of the EZLN

From Intercontinental Cry: http://intercontinentalcry.org/the-moral-and-organizational-strength-of-the-ezln/



"Next 1st of January will mark the first 18 years of the armed uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). A country that was on the threshold of modernity was surprised that thousands of insurgents, mostly indigenous, had taken up arms as a last resort, to fight for a better life for indigenous peoples and for the country.

The mobilization of thousands of Mexicans forced the state to negotiate with the insurgents for a decent and fair solution. After more than two years of intense negotiations, they managed to come to the first agreement between the federal government and the EZLN on indigenous rights and culture, which was signed on February 16, 1996, in the municipality of San Andres Larrainzar in Chiapas.

When an attempt was made for the agreement to be transferred to the Mexican legislative system through a bill drafted by the Commission for Agreement and Pacification (Cocopa), the state’s reaction was brutal, cynical and stark. The initiative contained the most important items agreed between the federal government and the EZLN, there was not one idea in it that had not been agreed by the parties."

Read more: http://intercontinentalcry.org/the-moral-and-organizational-strength-of-the-ezln/

Still Under Occupation

"Our land is still under occupation. Most of our people still live in exile. Dakota people are still prevented from practicing basic freedoms (even access to sacred sites). All of the systems and institutions to which we are subject are colonial in nature and they all prevent us from living freely as Dakota people. We hold a fraction of 1% of our original land base in Minisota and our populations would die if we had to subsist on those small parcels of land. Our populations still suffer from high rates of early mortality, suicide, and violence. We suffer tremendously from Western diseases (alcoholism, cancer, diabetes). We live in a society that continues to justify our extermination and non-existence while glorifying perpetrators of genocide and rationalizing land theft. And, we have largely, silently witnessed the destruction of our homeland through extensive mining, logging, manufacturing, energy production, industrial agriculture and animal feedlots."

- Waziyatawin

 

About:

Waziyatawin is a Dakota writer, teacher, and activist from the Pezihutazizi Otunwe (Yellow Medicine Village) in southwestern Minnesota. After receiving her Ph.D. in American history from Cornell University in 2000, she earned tenure and an associate professorship in the history department at Arizona State University where she taught for seven years. Waziyatawin currently holds the Indigenous Peoples Research Chair in the Indigenous Governance Program at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.

Courage: excerpt from Derrick Jensen's Endgame

Excerpted from Endgame vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization , by Derrick Jensen. Page 317-319.

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Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

William S. Burroughs

I learned about e-bombs from one of my students—Casey Maddox, an excellent writer—at the prison. He wrote an extraordinary novel about someone who is kidnapped and put through a twelve-step recovery program for an addiction to Western civilization. The book’s title is The Day Philosophy Died, and, as we’ll get to in a moment, that title is related to E-bombs.

E-bombs are, to my reckoning, one of the few useful inventions of the military- industrial complex. They are kind of the opposite of neutron bombs, which, if you remember, kill living beings but leave nonliving structures such as cities relatively intact: the quintessence of civilization. E-bombs, on the other hand, are explosive devices that do not hurt living beings, but instead destroy all electron- ics. Casey calls them “time machines,” because when you set one off you go back one hundred and fifty years.

At one point in the novel the kidnappers are going to use a small plane to drop an E-bomb over the Bay Area. They carry the bomb on board inside a casket. The main character asks, “Who died?”

“Philosophy,” someone says. “When philosophy dies,” that person continues, “action begins.”

As they prepare to set off the E-bomb, the main character keeps thinking, “There’s something wrong with our plan.” The thought keeps nagging him as they do their countdown to the celebration. Five, four, three, two, one. And the main character gets it, but too late. The E-bomb explodes. Their plane plummets.

One of the kidnappers clutches his chest, keels over. He’s got a pacemaker. Even nonviolent actions can kill people. At this point, any action, including inaction, has lethal consequences. If you are civilized, your hands are more or less permanently stained deep dark red with the blood of countless human and non- human victims.

Long before he finished the book, Casey showed me where he first read about E-bombs. It was in, of all places, Popular Mechanics. If you check the September 2001 issue out of the library—which even has rudimentary instructions for how to construct one—make sure you use someone else’s library card. Preferably someone you don’t like.

The article was titled, “E-bomb: In the Blink of an Eye, Electromagnetic Bombs Could Throw Civilization Back 200 Years. And Terrorists [sic] Can Build Them for $400.”

And that’s a bad thing?

The author, Jim Wilson, begins: “The next Pearl Harbor will not announce itself with a searing flash of nuclear light or with the plaintive wails of those dying of Ebola or its genetically engineered twin. You will hear a sharp crack in the distance. By the time you mistakenly identify this sound as an innocent clap of thunder, the civilized world will have become unhinged.”

So far so good.

He continues, “Fluorescent lights and television sets will glow eerily bright, despite being turned off. The aroma of ozone mixed with smoldering plastic will seep from outlet covers as electric wires arc and telephone lines melt. Your Palm Pilot and MP3 player will feel warm to the touch, their batteries over-loaded. Your computer, and every bit of data on it, will be toast.”

I know, I know, this all sounds too good to be true. But it gets even better.

Wilson writes,“And then you will notice that the world sounds different too. The background music of civilization, the whirl of internal-combustion engines, will have stopped. Save a few diesels, engines will never start again. You, however, will remain unharmed, as you find yourself thrust backward 200 years, to a time when electricity meant a lightning bolt fracturing the night sky. This is not a hypothetical, son-of-Y2K scenario. It is a realistic assessment of the damage the Pentagon believes could be inflicted by a new generation of weapons—E-bombs.”

When I mention all this at my shows, people often interrupt me with cheers.

The core of the E-bomb idea is something called a Flux Compression Generator (FCG), which the article in Popular Mechanics calls “an astoundingly simple weapon. It consists of an explosives-packed tube placed inside a slightly larger copper coil, as shown below. [The article even has a diagram!] The instant before the chemical explosive is detonated, the coil is energized by a bank of capacitors, creating a magnetic field. The explosive charge detonates from the rear forward. As the tube flares outward it touches the edge of the coil, thereby creating a moving short circuit. ‘The propagating short has the effect of compressing the magnetic field while reducing the inductance of the stator [coil],’ says Carlo Kopp [an Australian-based expert on high-tech warfare]. ‘The result is that FCGs will produce a ramping current pulse, which breaks before the final disintegration of the device. Published results suggest ramp times of tens of hundreds of microseconds and peak currents of tens of millions of amps.’ The pulse that emerges makes a lightning bolt seem like a flashbulb by comparison.”

As good as all this may sound (oh, sorry, I forgot that technological progress is good; civilization is good; destroying the planet is good; computers and televisions and telephones and automobiles and fluorescent lights are all good, and certainly more important than a living and livable planet, more important than salmon, swordfish, grizzly bears, and tigers, which means the effects of E-bombs are so horrible that nobody but the U.S. military and its brave and glorious allies should ever have the capacity to set these off, and they should only be set off to support vital U.S. interests such as access to oil, which can be burned to keep the U.S. economy growing, to keep people consuming, to keep the world heating up from global warming, to keep tearing down the last vestiges of wild places from which the world may be able to recover if civilization comes down soon enough), it gets even better (or worse, if you identify more with civilization than your landbase): After an E-bomb is detonated, and destroys local electronics, the pulse piggybacks through the power and telecommunication infrastructure. This, according to the article, “means that terrorists [sic] would not have to drop their homemade E-bombs directly on the targets they wish to destroy. Heavily guarded sites, such as telephone switching centers and electronic funds-transfer exchanges, could be attacked through their electric and telecommunication connections.”

The article concludes on this hopeful note: “Knock out electric power, computers and telecommunication and you’ve destroyed the foundation of modern society. In the age of Third World-sponsored terrorism, the E-bomb is the great equalizer.”

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Read more excerpts from Endgame, or purchase the book from Derrick Jensen's website.